A Weekend of Food

The weekend just gone, I decided to come home just because. It actually turned out to be quite an extended stay as I didn’t have any lectures on Friday, so caught the train back on Thursday evening and then went back to uni on Monday morning. It’s strange, but I always find when I come home that I do NOT stop eating the entire time. Literally! I was talking to my friend about this and she said that she does the same thing. All of a sudden you’re surrounded by lots of different, interesting, tasty food and you don’t have to pay for ANY of it! It’s amazing! I honestly don’t know how I managed to fit all the food I ate over the weekend inside me – it was quite impressive really. One of my favourite things about going home though, is being able to bake and cook whatever I want. I always come up with loads of things I want to try and make and then just spend the whole time in the kitchen creating more food to try and resist.

The first thing I made was inspired by Jamie Oliver’s 15 Minute Meals – pesto (Quorn) chicken pasta. It was pretty much a case of throwing lots of things together, and other than a little mishap when I forgot I was using dried pasta instead of fresh and that it would take 10 minutes, not 2, it all went ok and tasted delicious! All it took was frying the chicken pieces with spices, boiling a few vegetables along with pasta and then mixing it all up with a lot of pesto. It did take a little longer than 15 minutes, but I think with a bit more practice I would have it down to a fine art.

Next on the cooking list was a batch of scones. I’m not sure why, I’ve just been craving scones for a while and thought I would just do it. I’ve only tried to make scones once before, and got confused when it said to gently knead the dough. I ended up kneading it like you knead bread dough, instead of using the light touch of a professional scone baker and they ended up like rocks. This time though, I was prepared and my mum was on hand to give me a few pointers, and they turned out nicely. Lots of jam and cream and they were ready to be scoffed.

Creation number three of my weekend was a huge chocolate cake. There are two reasons for this chocolate cake being made – firstly, there’s nearly always a chocolate cake when I come home; and secondly, I was telling my mum about this AmAZing cake shop where I live that has the best tasting icing I’ve ever had. We worked out that the icing was ganache , after a lengthy description over the phone to my mum, and thought we really should have a go at making it. Of course, if you’re making ganache, you have to make a chocolate cake for it to go on, and so the chocolate cake just had to be made really! The ganache definitely paid off – it tasted SO good! Not quite as good as the one in the shop though, but I think I can get over that.

Last on the list turned out to be stuffed peppers with sweet potato yummy fried chip things. I wanted to do Jamie’s Awesome Potatoes, but we had a lot of sweet potatoes that needed eating so I tried it with those instead. They’re just as tasty. I wanted to try something new too and thought, why not try stuffed peppers? They were a bit time consuming and probably could have done with a few more minutes in the oven, but they did taste good. They were stuffed with spicy, garlic-y rice with sweetcorn and topped with cheddar and edam. I was thinking about maybe doing a thick cheese sauce to go on top next time instead, as the cheese kept falling off and didn’t melt like I wanted it to. (Apologies for the awful picture!).

So I did manage to try making lots of new things, which I really enjoyed. The thing about going home for short periods of time though, is that I find I want to do everything I would over two weeks. And in trying to do everything, I kind of ended up doing nothing. I did manage to go canoeing, which was really good, and I did do lots of cooking and baking which was also nice, but I just felt completely wiped out the entire time! It did make me look forward to the Easter holidays which is in less than three weeks time now (how has this term gone so quickly?!) when I can do everything at my own pace, albeit whilst cramming in lots of revision. I will hopefully be posting the recipes for a few of the things I made over the next few days – mainly the scones and ganache, I’m not sure that I took pictures for the others. So get your chef hats on and get ready to make some scones that you can spread your amazing ganache onto!

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Yum yum, I made scones today too Alice and for only the second time ever. I’ve had to limit myself to only trying one though as they are for a bring and share with lots of Americans, I thought they’d like a bit of an English afternoon tea….. Ahem, at 9am tomorrow morning!!!!!….. But I was very pleased with how they turned out 🙂 and that choccie cake looks SCRUMMY!! Xx